The last time we heard of Marc Lore, mk was lamenting that Amazon was able to “kill” his company Quidsi by, uh, giving him half a billion dollars. This followed a scorched earth price war in which new parents enjoyed $100 million worth of diaper discounts.
All this was bad for us regular folks, somehow, though we never got the details. mk did point out that this was about more than just diapers, and now I see just how right he was.
(A quick price check on the top hit for “diapers” suggests that Amazon-owned diapers.com has not yet deployed the moneymaking Screw the Customer campaign. Those calculating scoundrels!)
Mr. Lore, only mostly dead, seems not to have learned his lesson about taking on a bully and has founded Jet. The membership-based retail site plans to launch with ten million items and compete directly with Amazon, with a promise to offer the lowest prices.
I agree with the professor who calls it “a retailer designed by a consultant that makes sense in theory and has trouble in execution,” but while it lasts it will be another option for price-conscious customers to score cheap diapers and other goods.
I wonder if Jet is what b_b had in mind when he said that Amazon needed “some serious regulation to tamp down their empire.”
Perhaps someone will tell me this is still bad news because of the sweatshops.
Capitalism is predicated on competition. Whether Amazon is in the right or in the wrong depends on their endgame. If they are simply offering the lowest prices to consumers because then can, maybe we should be ok with that. If, on the other hand, they're using their place in the market to eliminate competition, then we should worry about a possible antitrust violation. I don't know where the line is, but I do tend to look suspiciously at overly aggressive behavior by businesses like theirs.
Amazon, like most businesses and individuals, is taking actions today that it hopes will lead to advantageous outcomes. You are saying that the moral value of these actions does not depend on what the actions are, nor how the actions affect others, but on what ultimate outcome Amazon hopes to achieve (whether they achieve it or not?). What exactly is the harm that you hope to avoid? One single entity somehow controlling the world's supply of diapers? Aren't there obvious workarounds in that unlikely scenario? (And it strikes me as odd that you aim to preserve competition by using an entity which has undisputed monopoly power over using force to regulate business.) When Amazon took on Quidsi, everybody benefitted. Now the "victim" that you seem interested in protecting is launching a substantially bigger effort to serve customers. Would this had happened if you had protected Quidsi from Amazon's clutches?Whether Amazon is in the right or in the wrong depends on their endgame.
I am sure I don't understand.offering the lowest prices to consumers because then can
"Because they can"? Surely they are offering low prices as part of a business strategy. Jeff Bezos doesn't care about anybody's dipaers.